Franciscan Converts in Kintyre
Alasdair Roberts
In July 1624 three Franciscan priests, Patrick Hegarty,
Cornelius Ward and Paul O'Neill, crossed from Antrim in Ireland to Kintyre
in Scotland by way of the island of Sanda. They were welcomed to Carskey
on the south coast by Hector McNeill, who was a Catholic. Thus began a remarkable
adventure for which twenty young men had volunteered at St Anthony's College,
Louvain, in the Spanish Netherlands. Thus was implemented a plan laid down
by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, managed by
the Papal Nuncio in Brussels, and put into the hands of a small group of
experienced priests. As place-names like Kilcolmkill (the church of Colum
Cille or Columba) reminded people in Kintyre, Christianity came to Scotland
from Ireland. The Franciscans of Louvain shared the faith and the language
of their forebears, and these attributes were to take them north to the Uists
and inland to Glengarry in a mission which lasted until the outbreak of civil
war in three kingdoms. It was successful in a number of areas which are still
predominantly Catholic but not, despite a promising start, in Kintyre.(1)
The 17th century world was divided by the politics of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the corner of it linking Scotland and Ireland there came expulsion from ancestral lands followed by the plantation of new settlers, most obviously in Ulster but also in Kintyre. There was a long history of contact between the two places. Some time before 500 AD the sons of Erc crossed the Sea of Moyle from Dalriada in an invasion which eventually brought the kingdom of Scotland into being. Warriors later went back to Ireland. Men of Kintyre must have been in the Norse Gael army at the battle of Clontarf in 1014, and again when the grandson of Somerled besieged Derry in 1212. Later in the 13th century the Irish tried to resist the Anglo-Norman conquest by employing 'galloglaigh' mercenaries from the Highlands, notably the McSweens of Knapdale and the McDonalds of Islay and Kintyre.(2) Clan Donald came to take a particular interest in Antrim during the 15th century. Based at Dunyveg in Islay, Iain Mor Tanaister the second son of John, first Lord of the Isles, was described as 'dominus de Dunwage et de Glynns', the additional title coming through marriage with the heiress to the Glens of Antrim.(3) Sorley Boy McDonnell (1505-1590), the youngest son of Alexander McDonald of Dunyveg, Kintyre and the Glynns, was born in Antrim and spent most of his long life fighting against the English and the native Irish for the lands he had inherited in Antrim. He raised levies in Kintyre.
A distinction can be made between the Glens of Antrim, facing Scotland, and the fertile lowlands extending west to the River Bann. These became part of James VI and I's Plantation of Ulster, whereas 'the Glens were not a juicy conquest for those whose living ultimately depended on agriculture, but a place of refuge separated from Kintyre by the sea, from the rest of Ireland by mountain and bog, and protected from within by steep rocky slopes and dense woods.'(4) Sorley Boy's military fastness was to become a place of refuge for Kintyre adherents of Clan Donald in the 17th century. The sparsely populated Glens stood in marked contrast to south-west Argyll, where pressure on some of the best land in the Highlands and Islands was transformed into politics and military struggle.
Having effectively lost control of Kintyre in 1599, the Islay McDonalds failed to win it back eight years later. In 1609, as Campbell expansion began to take effect,(5) Gilleasbuig Gruamach 7th Earl of Argyll was confirmed in his ownership of Kintyre by the Scottish Privy Council in an Act which specified (ineffectively, as it turned out) that no land should be held by McDonalds or their dependants.(6) These are listed, with 53 names including McAllister, Mackay, Macoshenag, McEachan and McEachran.(7) McNeills were also included, which helps to explain the strategy of the Franciscan enterprise thirteen years later.(8)
Hector McNeill of Carskey was an educated man, almost unique among the area's leading men (all Gaelic-speakers) in being able to write. Along with Sir James McDonald, he actually signed a bond of manrent at Killeonan in 1594 when others had their hands 'led on the pen'.(9) McNeill played a key role during a period when control of Kintyre was in dispute between two sons of the Earl of Argyll: Lord Lorne by one marriage, Lord Kintyre by another. The second Countess belonged to the English family of Cornwallis and was a Catholic. As a young man in 1594 Argyll had led his followers to unexpected defeat at Glenlivet against a much smaller army of Gordons and Hays. Their battle ciy was 'Virgin Mary'.(10) Possibly influenced by this, the Earl embraced his second wife's religion and entered the service of the king of Spain in the Netherlands. That was in 1617. There he met another exile, Sir James McDonald, and the two appear to have agreed a compromise on the former lands of Clan Donald in south-west Scotland.
Clearly the Franciscan mission to Scotland had a political dimension which reflected the dispositions of leading men. James Stuart, who became Supreme Governor of the Church of England in 1603, was involved. His queen, Ann of Denmark, recently converted in Scotland, practised her Catholic religion in secret.'(11) James VI and I received with equanimity a warning from his Bishop of the Isles: 'The king laughed, and said there was no need to be angry with those who were converting people so wild as the people of Kintyre to Christianity, even if that Christianity came from Rome, but that such missionaries deserved to be thanked.'(12) The possibility of Kintyre being legally returned to the McDonalds remained alive throughout the period of the mission, with Lord Kintyre granting a charter to that effect at Dunaverty in 1635. At the time of the Franciscan landing Hector McNeill controlled not only the extensive lands of Carskey but also, with royal approval, the newly built castle at Lochhead. That place became Campbeltown in name and fact, however, when Lord Lorne succeeded as Marquis of Argyll.(13)
Like Hector McNeill, Archibald McDonald of Sanda was already a Catholic when the missionaries landed. A Father McCann is said to have visited Sanda in 1598.(14) If this date is correct, then the Franciscan mission began much earlier - at least in relation to an island even closer to Antrim than Kintyre. New perspective is added to a comment of 1618: 'Edward McCann went to the Hebrides, as it fell to his lot to go there, and because he had the best knowledge of Scottish Gaelic.'(15) This raises interesting questions about the extent to which Irish and Scots Gaelic- speakers could understand each other, but Patrick Hegarty (later proposed as Irish bishop for the Scottish Gaidhealtachd(16)) was in charge when the mission came to Kmtyre:
'On 14 July 1624 Hegarty and his companions left Ireland for Scotland and next day landed on the island of Sanda, where Hegarty explained the meaning of the sacred vestments to the islanders and preached to them. They had been instructed in the elements of the faith four years before by another Irish Franciscan but had seen no priest since then. Hegarty and his companions baptised four children, and fishermen who had come from Kintyre were instructed in the faith by them; forty went to confession and received communion that day.'(17) The focus of this article is on those who were listed as 'converts'(18) in Kintyre. None are mentioned here: Sanda's few inhabitants were already regarded as Catholics, though poorly instructed. The visiting fishermen were probably not incorporated in any list, but the receiving of communion after instruction and confession of past sins represented the normal process of conversion. The site of this act of evangelisation was presumably the ruined chapel and graveyard on the north side of Sanda, facing Southend. Founded from St Ninian's monastery at Whithorn, it had a seven foot cross and a low stone wall with 'seven large and polished stones in the middle of which is an obelisk, higher than a man's stature'.(19) This is reminiscent of the chapel of Rona, in the Atlantic north of Lewis, with its altar 'on which there lies a big Plank of Wood about ten feet in length; every Foot has a hole in it, and in every hole a Stone, to which the Natives ascribe several Virtues.'(20)
The missionaries landed in Kintyre and spent their first night(21) in the open, not making contact with Hector McNeill (who may have away been from home) until the following evening. All three Franciscans slept at Carskey, and then Ward and O'Neill left on the next stage of their journey to the Hebrides. Before boarding a boat on the west coast 'they visited a Catholic widow who had not seen a priest for some years, and they gave communion to her and all her family, having first converted two of them.'(22) In a previous article dealing with this subject from an Antrim viewpoint,(23) one key error was to assume that the Franciscans confined their efforts to South Kintyre. Ward and O'Neill moved on to Cara,(24) having been brought six miles down the Kintyre coast by boat. It now seems likely that the encounter with the widow took place among the McDonalds of Largie, where there was still a Catholic allegiance in 1689.(25) The following passage may be a description of how it was established:
'In a neighbouring village O'Neill converted the wife of the laird, and Ward brought her husband, her son, and her son's wife back to the faith. That night the missionaries stayed with another Catholic widow, and in the morning administered the sacraments to herself and to twelve others. On the evening of the same day they converted an old lady on her deathbed, and her sister also embraced the faith.'
(1) The Papal Nuncio in Brussels thought that Kintyre was one of the Western Isles and described it as 'Scintyria insula'. Rev. Cathaldus Giblin OFM, Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland, 1619-1646 (Dublin, 1964), 25. It was often so described by Gaels who knew better. Colm O Baoill, personal communication 1 Sept. 1995.
(2) Andrew McKerral, 'West Highland mercenaries in Ireland', Scottish Historical Review ,xxx (1951), 1-15.
(3) Rev. George Hill, The Macdonnells of Antrim (Belfast, 1873).
(4) Brian S. Turner, Distributional Aspects of Family Name Study Illustrated in the Glens of Antrim. Ph.D. thesis (Queen's University Belfast, 1974), 138.
(5) Edward J. Cowan, Fishers in drumlie waters: clanship and Campbell expansion in the time of Gilleasbuig Gruamach', Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness , liv (1986), 269-312.
(6) Acts and Decreits of the Lords of Council,vol. 330, f 79.
(7) Andrew McKerral, Kintyre in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1948), 27.
(8) Alasdair Roberts, 'Bonamargy and the Scottish Mission', The Glynns , 16 (1988), 33-40.
(9) Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, The Last MacDonalds of Isla (Glasgow, 1895), quoted by A. I. B. Stewart, 'An Auld Alliance', Kintyre Magazine, 27 (summer 1990), 22. See also McKerral, Kintyre , 149.
(10) H. Dunnett, Invera'an, a Strathspey Parish (Paisley, 1919), 78.
(11) William Forbes-Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh, 1885), 264.
(12) Giblin, Franciscan Mission ,46.
(13) McKerral, Kintyre 12, 30, 34, 149. For a more recent account of the complex politics of the area in the early 17th centuiy see David Stevenson, Alasdair MacCotta and the Highland Problem in the 17th Century (Edinburgh, 1980).
(14) Alastair Henderson, 'Sanda', KM 20 (winter 1986). 16.
(15) Giblin, Franciscan Mission ,3.
(16) Ibid., 179.
(17) Ibid., 32.
(18) John Lorne Campbell of Canna is at one with Fr Giblin in questioning the notion of converts: 'I have always felt that the Franciscans should have written of 'reconciliations' rather than of 'conversions' - the latter word suggests conversion from dyed-in-the-wool Calvinism, whereas the conversions were mostly from a state of ignorance mixed with confused Catholic traditions and folklore.' Personal communication, November 1987.
(19) Henderson, 'Sanda', 16.
(20) Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (London, 1703), 21.
(21) There is a conflict on dates. Patrick Hegarty says the party left Ireland on 14 July 1624 and reached Sanda the next day. Cornelius Ward has 21 July as the date of their departure. Giblin, Franciscan Mission , 32, 50.
(22) Ibid., 51.
(23) Alasdair Roberts, 'Retreat from Kintyre to the Glens: the evidence of family names', The Glynns , 18 (1990), 14-23.
(24) Giblin, Franciscan Mission , 51.
(25) Paul A. Hopkins, 'Loup Hill, 16th May 1689: the first 'battle' of Dundee's Jacobite wars KM, 29 (summer 1991), 4.
To be continued
No 39 Spring 1996
Page 2: Campbeltown Whalers
Page 4: Mr. Macslimun - Clydeside Cameos
Page 5: Military Echoes
Page 6: The Cuckoo is a Bonnie bird // Roadside Flowers
Page 7: James Watt at Campbeltown - Part 1
Page 8: By Hill and Shore - Part 1
Page 9: The Screws